3d cad

I bet you a bag of plush porglets you’ve had dreams of owning, building or transferring your conscience into your very own BB-8. If you also happen to have a Google Home device (or not), I may just have found you the perfect excuse for 3D printing the adorable spherical droid. Manchester’s own Steve Wagg…

Autodesk is making very significant changes to their Fusion 360 product offerings. Fusion 360 is Autodesk’s flagship 3D design tool that is offered in a cloud-based subscription service. The system provides not only CAD, but also CAM, simulations and even generative components. It’s proven quite popular in certain circles. As of October 7th, they will no…

Dassault SOLIDWORKS is corporately swinging down from the rafters of development mode to announce the upcoming new features in SOLIDWORKS 2019. If you’re worried about SOLIDWORKS slowing development to pursue XDesign interest (that just gained some new features), this release may sway your opinion. There are plenty of new features to love and, if you’ve…

Dassault Systèmes, producers of the popular SOLIDWORKS 3D modeling system, announced an educational partnership that may suggest something interesting. The company struck a deal with UMass Lowell to jointly open a “digital learning center” on campus to “let engineering students get hands-on experience in designing and creating products for the Experience Economy”. They explain further:…

Zippable is a novel approach to make most any stuffable, huggable 3D fabric-based shape you can think of. As the name suggests, a zipper is used as the closure system. But what’s really cool about Zippables is the super long spiraling zippers. The spiraling motion as the zipper is closed, magically transforms a twisty, curvy…

Ya know, while there are various ways to collaborate online around a 3D CAD project with other like-minded designers and engineers, you don’t hear about it too often. We’ve yet to get to the real-time, live-edit environment, à la Google Docs, but we’re close. You may have built a few 3D models in Onshape but,…

Creating a 3D model in VR isn’t as revolutionary as it once was. If the presence of Quill and Medium on the Oculus Rift weren’t enough, Google’s own Gravity Sketch, Tilt Brush, and Blocks programs add to the ever-increasing library of software which wants to make the craft more accessible. Now we have MasterpieceVR, another…

With Mercedes-Benz announcing last year that it is now selling 3D printed spare parts for its cargo trucks, 3D printing is gaining momentum as a commercial strategy for large-scale manufacturers. But what does 3D printing mean for non-enterprise businesses and entrepreneurs? Can 3D printing really offer ordinary people the chance to change their lives? As the technology…

There are 3D print fashion designers, and there are fashion designers who go a bit farther. One of them is Francis Bitonti. Bitonti has been working in the 3D print field of fashion design for many years, and we’ve seen his works at multiple exhibitions. In fact, our records show that he’s been awarded Fabbaloo’s…

You remember rolling out of bed extra early for a week long CAD training session? The coffee and breaks couldn’t come fast enough. Outside of online courses here and there, onsite, expensive training is the norm. Onshape isn’t the norm. And they’ve headbutted standard practice again with the launch of their own Learning Center. Onshape…

Draft angles are fundamental to part design. If you want to make physical things, you gotsta’ master draft. In his inaugural post, the great Vince “Skill Coach” Haley shows you how. There’s nothing like the musty aroma of carefully crafted paper mache popping free of its surrogate mold. And to my daughter’s delight, that’s exactly…

It’s the first day of February, 2016. Time for the biggest CAD industry event for a single software package. SolidWorks World 2016 is on and there’s an ethereal feel in the air. Maybe it’s the rapturous, simultaneous geeking of thousands of SolidWorks users. Maybe it’s the 75 degree Dallas, Texas weather in the middle of…

It’s been a forest of quiet chirps, gentle rains and hidden high fives in Cambridge, MA, headquarters of Onshape. The company launched quietly in 2012 as Belmont Technology Inc. and started turning heads with an all-star roster of CAD industry elite. Now with a shapely new name and a team of nearly 100, you can…

Are 3D CAD companies adding the features that users really want? We asked you, SolidSmackers, to tell us what you find most face-bashingly frustrating about 3D CAD tools today, boy, did you deliver. As it turns out…

There is a big booty attached to the Crisp Brake MTB – a hundred thousand dollars to be precise – and the goal sounds a bit too stretched. However, a quick chat with the man behind it all, Allan Song Crisp, gives you an idea and a good look behind why the cycling, motorcycling and…

Ok, now this is more like it. I’ll try to tell you without choking on the beauty of this, but since my larynx is already convulsing, you may have to proceed on your own. I know, you’ve probably had your fill of web-based 3D modeling applications. What’s that? There aren’t any? You mean, they’re weren’t…

Well, would you look at that. You’ve put on the ‘nice shirt’ to start the week off and nobody has said a thing. Well, TEAR. IT. OFF. and as you do, scream VUUCH! at the top of your lungs. Sure it will get attention, but even more important, it will shred the vocal cords and…

Seriously, no bullets are gonna help, no alliance with the undead or any sort of blunt object or girly scream. The end… is near…. and where ever you run, the werewolf hordes are approaching. Fortunately, you’ve already been bitten and eventually you’ll feel a a sharp bone shifting jab as technological morphotypes wrap their corpuscular…

If you get the fever and shakes just thinking about moving to new technology, I’m with you. (I’m totally not with you) I’d much prefer to just stick my finger in my throat and vomit magnificent cad data all over a glass office table. Can you imagine?… you SO know that would be awesome. People…

OK, so the last poll revealed that no one cares if the OS goes away as long as our lovely apps work. Hoorah. But who cares about OS this or OS that when you can model up something sweet you’ve always wanted to, right? There’s the 3D modeling at your day job, but what if…

Welcome. It’s knee-slappin’, face-movin’ time again here on SolidSmack and this week we introduce to you Mr. Doob, who thought it a pleasant idea, in his Flash experimentation, to show you what it’s like to have a 3D scene position itself based on the position of you melon. You can play with the mouse-driven version,…

Set the sticks and mud aside. Playing with objects in our physical world is nothing against the impending sensorific-digitized-virtual-realitastic onslaught of completely augmented playtime for you and the kiddos. You may be seeing Frantz Lasorne very cool concept for a ‘blaster bot’ style kids game floating around. It uses nothing but the pure goodness of…

What exactly do you get when you stick two highly talented SolidWorks users, a middle-age product manager and thick sarcasm into a small trailer? Only the most jaw-tightening 3D CAD video series hilarity to ever be broadcast across the vast reaches of limited wi-fi access. These videos wreak of everything your design universe is composed…

I’m telling ya, you wake up one morning and screens are just sliding out all over the place. Soon they’ll be yelling, ‘touch me!’, ‘no, touch me!’ – but for now look what Lenovo is sliding out to the masses January 5th at CES. The Lenovo W700ds. A laptop with a slide-out secondary screen. Magnificent,…

Prepare to wrap yourself in some warm flexible display technology on a cold wintry night. The news is getting more common and the screens themselves are getting larger. Gamers and advertising is getting all excited about being able to wrap ‘experience’ in every corner of a room or building, but how it could effect 3D…

Come in out of the large open spaces, where you risk inevitable attacks from throngs of flying ninjas, and have a look at the near possibility of how we will be interfacing with virtual objects in the future. 3D space is a pretty big area to be manipulating like a clump of old clay, but…

Today, the T-mobile G1 phone running the highly anticipated Google Android OS, that everyone is scraping the brick off of buildings to see, is being revealed. On top of that it’s cutting into position for iPhone/Blackberry replacement and plans to take over a large segment of smartphone users by the end of the year. THe…

Ok, so it’s here. The first attempt at 3D CAD on a mobile device that just happens to be developed by Apple. Oh yeah, and the there’s the multi-touch thing. Fabio Policarpo currently working as a Senior Engineer at DoubleFine Productions, a game developer in San Francisco, California. Who knows the motivation he had behind…